It is commonly known that globally, about two-thirds of modern pharmaceutical products are based on ingredients derived from plants. For thousands of years, indigenous peoples have used plant based ingredients to treat various illnesses.
Generally, pharmaceutical companies use production methods to isolate a chemical compound which is reproduced and used as the active ingredient in new drugs.
However, these production methods do not provide for the use of many other active compounds and may not even identify them through chemical analysis. In some cases, the chemical compound so isolated may turn out to have less effective therapeutic properties while a more effective chemical compound remains unused in the production process.
On the other hand, herbal medicines are generally prepared by only a few rudimentary methods resulting in the use of alcohol as an extractive to produce alcohol based tinctures, or water as an extractive to produce teas, or concentrating the juice of a plant to form a syrup. These methods reflect a single step purification or an incomplete boiling process.
Herbal medicines produced by these methods do not have particulate matter, tannins, and toxins removed from the therapeutic extract, the presence of which diminishes the effectiveness of the extract by reducing absorption of the extract by the body.